by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/07/27 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/07/27/4075592.aspx
It was just a few days ago that I talked about how my Dell laptops have a new neighbor, who says hello, and I foolishly claimed I would not be going the Boot Camp/Vista route with it.
I only made it a few days before I ended up installing Boot Camp and Vista (both 32-bit and 64-bit, more on this soon!).
In my defense, I did it after I heard back about the problem I reported yesterday in Report of blank previews of unknown etiology.
Turns out this is a Boot Camp bug (at least in 1.3, maybe in other versions), and an unsupported Windows configuration involving MSKLC keyboard layouts being installed somewhere other than the system32 directory!
They add a bunch of keyboards that you can see right in the user interface:
and then if you look at the previews, you get the reported behavior:
Bummer.
Now if you look in the registry, you'll see where these keyboards are listed:
(note that this is the install on the 64-bit machine, which is broken for the additional reason that we will get to shortly but is also broken in the 32-bit version)
The keyboard DLL not being in the appropriate %windir% directory is the reason that the keyboard is not showing up in the preview -- it is failing to load.
Looking at the properties of the file:
This is clearly an MSKLC 1.3 DLL (we changed the property name to fit into one of the known Vista properties in 1.4), and as I mentioned the 32-bit version has many problems loading as well as the additional known problems with 1.3 on 64bit that made my experience above even less likely to work....
Now as a rule, Microsoft doesn't support keyboard layouts that are created with MSKLC but not installed with its setup package.
But assuming Apple did their due diligence and grabbed all of the settings and put them in their image, then the existing problems are:
1) They should be installing to the system32 directory (and the syswow64 directory for wow64 on x64), and
2) They should be using MSKLC 1.4 so they can pick up 64-bit support and better Vista support overall.
But keep in mind that Boot Camp 1.4 is still in beta and I am technically a beta tester of it, so you can consider this to be a bug report! :-)
Now, if you fix problem #1 above, then (as Olivier indicates), all of the problems on 32-bit will be resolved, and the 64-bit can be resolved as above (like many other people, I am assuming 64-bit issues will eventually be resolved!).
Despite the flaws I think this is a really cool usage of MSKLC and once they fix up the specific issues here I think that this is the kind of usage of MSKLC that really could put the number of tool downloads to shame when compared against the number of MSKLC keyboards.
So it's like a little piece of work that I was involved with be on a bunch of Macs, too. I am excited!
If anyone from Apple wants more info on this issue then they can of course contact me here. I'll be around and eager to help make sure that that the Mac/Vista story works well....
(special thanks to Olivier and David Tickle for their hints that helped encourage me to take a closer look!)
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# Cristian Secară on 27 Jul 2007 7:10 AM:
Is there any particular reason you refer to (or use here) MSKLC 1.3 instead of 1.4 ?
Cristi
# Michael S. Kaplan on 27 Jul 2007 7:46 AM:
Because that is what Boot Camp used?
I recommend they use 1.4, but at the moment they are using 1.3.
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